(Euro)trashing an American Classic

What Happens When an Avant-Garde Director Stages a Remix of an American Standard? Nothing Great.

By

Terry Teachout

Updated Sept. 22, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

Lillian Hellman lived a radical life, both politically and sexually, but when it came to her art, she was as traditional as a nun. She wrote "well-made" melodramas in which every corner of the plot is neatly tucked in, and her down-to-earth craftsmanship is one reason "The Little Foxes" was and is so popular. Not only did it run for a year on Broadway, but it has been revived regularly ever since that first production closed in 1940. I've seen it performed many times, and all of those stagings have been both naturalistic and true to the play's setting, Alabama in 1900.

ENLARGE

Tina Benko, left, and Elizabeth Marvel star in the New York Theatre Workshop production of Lillian Hellman's 'The Little Foxes.'
Jan Versweyveld

The Little Foxes

Now, though, the avant-garde has finally come knocking on Hellman's door: Ivo van Hove, a Flemish director who specializes in iconoclastic remixes of classics, has given us a high-concept "Little Foxes."

Mr. van Hove's approach is easily explained: It's a modern-dress staging performed without Southern accents on a minimalist set, accompanied by minimalist music. If you see a lot of Shakespeare or go to the opera several times a year, you'll more than likely be familiar with the rest of the tricks in his bag. Jan Versweyveld's set, presumably intended to suggest a seven-figure Manhattan duplex, contains no furniture except for a Hammond organ in the corner and a video screen on the wall that is used to project offstage scenes. Kevin Guyer's costumes mostly run to shades of black. All the performers have clearly been instructed to act in as up-to-date a manner as possible, and at regular intervals they lapse into fits of hysterical violence and/or deliberate overacting. Thibaud Delpeut's incidental music underlines each change of mood as rigidly as a horror-flick score. There is no curtain and no intermission.

You are, perhaps, getting the point? The plot of "Little Foxes," in which the hateful members of a family of exploitative nouveau-riche tradesmen claw one another's eyes out over a business deal, is—brace yourself—as contemporary as today's headlines! Thank you, Mr. van Hove, for trotting out all the clichés in the postmodern book to tell us something about "The Little Foxes" that anyone with a quarter of a brain could figure out on his own and that everyone who's seen the play already knows. If the purpose of a conceptual production of a classic is to shed new light, then this one fails in spades.

The really sad part is that Mr. van Hove has put together a stageful of class-A actors to enact his simple-minded take on "The Little Foxes." Elizabeth Marvel and Cristin Milioti, who play Regina, the villainess-in-chief, and Alexandra, her soon-to-be-disillusioned daughter, turn in performances of attention-seizing intensity that are as revelatory as the production itself is trite. Ms. Marvel may well be the most admired under-50 stage actress in New York, give or take Zoe Kazan. And Ms. Milioti, who distinguished herself earlier this year in "That Face," is well on the way to getting herself talked about wherever plays are cast. Hardly less noteworthy are Christopher Evan Welch and Thomas Jay Ryan, who play Horace and Oscar, Regina's hapless husband and brother, while their colleagues, if not quite so individual, nonetheless leave next to nothing to be desired.

I've been rough on Mr. van Hove, so let me say that on the not-infrequent occasions when he lifts the scrim of trickery and lets the actors get down to business, his staging becomes direct and forceful and you see the outlines of what could have been a distinguished revival. Indeed, about two-thirds of this production is impressive by any standard, and Ms. Marvel's Regina—big, sexy, threateningly intelligent—is a once-seen-never-forgotten piece of acting.

Alas, the nonsense always starts up again, and much of it is so dumb that the momentum built up by the cast is totally dispelled. Worst of all is the very end, in which that damned video screen shows us Alexandra catching a plane to anywhere but here, accompanied by John Lennon's "Woman Is the Nigger of the World." The only way that Mr. van Hove could have topped that overripe bit of Eurotrash would have been for Regina to produce a bullwhip and start flogging her black servants during the curtain calls.

Still, Ms. Marvel in particular makes this production worthy of your attention. Be forewarned, though: You'll find it hard not to laugh in all the wrong places.

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